The Rent My Sister Kept

The front room had been painted, and not badly, either. The walls were a soft sage green instead of the cream Mom had lived with for twenty years. A row of a child’s drawings was taped along the hallway at about the height of a four-year-old’s eyes.

A framed photograph of Dad in his Army dress uniform still hung over the piano. I looked at it twice.

“That’s my husband,” Mom said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jolene said from the kitchen doorway. She had come out wiping her hands on her jeans. “Marsha said to leave it. She said the owner’s family wanted it kept. We dust it every Saturday.”

Mom looked at the photograph for a long moment.

“Thank you for that,” she said, and her voice was not quite steady.

Her cast iron skillet hung on its nail by the stove, where she had left it. Somebody had used it. Somebody had seasoned it right.

“Who keeps this up?” she asked.

“I do, ma’am,” Jolene said. “My grandmother had one like it. I didn’t want it to rust.”

Mom sat down at her own kitchen table, in her own chair, with a stranger’s baby bottle at her elbow, and folded her hands on the oilcloth.

Shawn stood with the baby on his hip, his face the color of putty. “Mrs. Dunn,” he said. “How long has she been taking it?”

“Since the first of November, I believe. Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Eleven hundred a month. We paid first month and a deposit, eleven hundred each. Twenty-two hundred to start.” He swallowed.

“I never knew, ma’am. I swear before God. I would have sent it to you straight if I had known. I wanted to put it in a bank. She told me the owner didn’t do banks, and she needed cash because of the way her Social Security worked.”

“I do banks, Shawn,” Mom said gently. “I do them very well.”

Jolene put her hand on her husband’s back. She was shaking.

“We found it on Marketplace,” she said. “The ad had pictures. Three bedrooms, close to Theo’s school, eleven hundred. We’d been in a motel for two months after our apartment flooded. We thought it was a miracle. We thought,” her voice went thin, “somebody finally gave us a break.”

“You did nothing wrong, honey,” Mom said. “Not one thing. I want you both to hear that from me, today, in my own kitchen.”

Shawn put his free hand over his eyes.

“I have a question,” Mom said. “How do you pay, Shawn? In what form?”

“Cash, ma’am. In an envelope. On the first. She comes to the porch.”

“Is the envelope ready?”

He hesitated, and then he nodded. He went down the hall and came back with a plain white envelope, thicker than I expected. He held it out with both hands, the way you hold the offering plate.

“Eleven hundred dollars,” he said. “Here, ma’am. Please. I am so sorry.”

My mother looked at it for a moment. Then she took it.

She did not count it. She laid it on the oilcloth, set her reading glasses on her nose, took the legal pad out of her pocketbook, unfolded it, and wrote something at the top in her careful pencil hand.

“Shawn,” she said. “Do you have a receipt book?”

“A what, ma’am?”

“I thought not. I will write you one.”